Wednesday, 27 August 2014

A LITTLE (BIG) WHITE LIE

[ONE FROM THE ARCHIVES TODAY. NEW ONE TOMORROW]

I was watching a ‘news’ show the other night and the whole
show was about the big lies that some people tell, not the small ones like,
‘I’m really 38 again. Really I am.’ In this case the lies ran the gamut from
people impersonating people, lying about one’s age (the man in question went back to high school to relive his glory as a
basketball player) and the doozy of all doozies, a woman lied to her boyfriend,
her family and the community at large about her health. We’ll get to that one
in a minute.

The overwhelming trend of the entire program – aside from the
fact that all these individuals had a serious lying problem – was the sheer
desperation from which these people operated their lives. Each clearly had a
hole the size of the Grand Canyon where the scruples and soul were supposed to be and
yet, the crazy part was, each assumed that their intention for the lie was
coming from the right place. I suppose that is what everyone thinks when they
spin a big fat white one (aside from serial killers and murderers; something
tells me the don’t give a sh*t about intention). It never continues to amaze me how one can, over time, believe their own lies.

So the less offensive of the offenders (and I say this
lightly as…well, it’s shades of grey when it comes to this lot) was a guy who
lied about his age and returned to high school so he could relive his golden
moments as an athlete – guess his path as a professional athlete was limited.
Harmless enough – outside of being totally sad, as whom the hell wants to
relive high school. Okay fine, I’m sure a lot of us would like to return to a
simpler time when all we had to worry about was exams and how much beer to
drink at the weekends; but on paper, it is kind of scary someone took that much
time to fabricate an entire identity so that they could return to the hallowed
halls of False Security High. He was of course eventually spotted out with his
‘high school’ buddies by his adulthood buddies – or at least people that knew
him under a different name, and the gig, as they say, was up.

The other offender was definitely more unbelievable and
well, downright criminal. He was an middle aged man that was dressing as an old
woman and then going into banks to…well, I fell asleep during the good bit, but
when I woke up he was dressed in old lady drag taking his mug shot, so I
assumed he had committed a felony and was going to psych ward in a New York
Minute.

But the lie that absolutely floored me as well as the
reporter on the show (I love a reporter’s face when they’re interviewing
someone who they think is certifiable) was about a woman and what she would do
to keep her man. Sheila – let’s call her that cause I have limited memory at this point – was having problems with her boyfriend. They had
had two children, but he wouldn’t commit, and they broke up numerous times and
previous to the big fat doozy of a lie, he was ignoring her and being a pretty
crap baby daddy. So, what’s a girl to do? Well, Sheila decided that she would
pretend that she was dying of cancer so that baby
daddy would put a ring on it. Apparently this method worked and to her shock,
worked so well that he moved her in to his house within days and the within
weeks the entire community had rallied around her and started donating towards their wedding, honeymoon and her final days on this
planet. Even the newspapers got involved writing touching tributes about this
blushing bride with only a few months to live.

The only snag of course was that Sheila was in perfect
health and had no idea how to stop the freight train of a lie that was HURTLING
down the track towards a very large brick wall called CONSEQUENCE. And of
course, instead of stopping the lie before the money started pouring in, the
free honeymoon, the dress, make-up and all the rest of it was showered upon
her, she decided to shave her head, pretend she had chemo and dive straight
into the deep end of the liar’s abyss. Unreal, right? The best part, when she
was telling this whole story to the reporter, she was trying to justify it all
by telling the audience how torn up she was by the lie that she wanted to kill
herself. So torn up and suicidal that she has a two hour video of her at her
wedding doing an in depth dirty dancing number with her husband where she is
partying like it’s 1999…or like she has cancer.

Needless to say, she finally got found out, was utterly
ostracized by everyone, lambasted in the press, became a national news story,
but get this…her husband took her back and said, ‘I tried to hate her, but love
is love.’ As you can see, he’s a pretty generous, forgiving man – or a total
gullible moron, I’m not sure which. Humans never cease to amaze (mortify) me.